Conventionally, the use of software and/or hardware on a computer system commonly leads to users of the computer systems encountering error messages. One way to find the cause and/or solution for an error message is to enter the error message into a search engine and perform a search on the error message. Searching for an error message as is can lead to very few or very large number of results as illustrated in the example below.
For example, an error message may contain parameters that are specific to the execution of a given computer program. An error encountered in the open-source database program MySQL®, available on the Internet at www.MySQL.com, when the program is unable to open a shared library mydb.so is “Error 1126: Can't open a shared library mydb.so.” In this error message, the parameter “mydb.so” is specific to the execution of the program. A disadvantage is that if such a specific error message is searched for using a search engine, the number of search results returned may be too limited or may typically yield irrelevant results. By comparison, searching for a more general error message, like “authentication failed,” may generate too many search results to be of value and again providing too many irrelevant results. A further disadvantage is that if the error message is searched as is, i.e., the complete error message is provided to the search engine, the resultant set may contain no result or a set of results that are irrelevant to the context being searched.
Further, users are typically not aware of the particular formats of error messages, and it becomes tedious and cumbersome for the users to identify and remove execution-specific parameters from the error messages in order to refine the search query. If the user is able to perform this identity and removal, the user has to manually and iteratively search for the error message using a suitable search engine, starting with the error message received and then generalizing the error message or making it more specific until a relevant set of results is found. A disadvantage is that such a manually iterative process, however, is also inconvenient for users and time consuming.
Therefore, there is a need to alleviate one or more of the disadvantages by an improved system and method of efficiently searching error messages thereby finding the cause and/or solution to the error messages.